Impossible Mission - Where are the spheres ???

[SkulleateR]

Ok, after so many CPC input I decided to play one of my fav games - Impossible Mission


After completing it (must be over a 100 times now) I watched some youtube vids of different versions and saw a black sphere in the C64 version. I couldn´t resist and fired up my C64, throw in the game and, there they are. Making the game slightly harder btw. but still I cannot get in touch with those Commodore colors 


So does anyone have an idea, why those spheres don´t appear in the CPC version ? How about other versions (yes, I´m lazy, didn´t check), are there spheres ?


Just curious 

[andycadley]

They're not in the Speccy or CPC versions, I know that. Honestly I always thought they were a bit crappy and the game is better without them. YMMV.

[SkulleateR]

Of course it´s better without them, but maybe anyone knows if this was a design issue or something technical back those days 

[zeropolis79]

Only thing I can think of is that they were dropped to prevent severe slowdown which would have killed the flow of the game..

[andycadley]

It's not that large or complex a sprite and doesn't need any masking, I can't imagine that would be a reason to omit it.


I'd assume either whoever did the port just wasn't aware of it (BITD it was quite common for ports to be done based on vague descriptions and a couple of screenshots without access to the original hardware), couldn't replicate the movement logic well enough or just straight up thought it was crap. I like to assume it was the latter. :-P